A Mortal Antipathy Part 12

"Yes, Murray is generally accurate. Sometimes he makes mistakes, but I can't say how far you have copied them. You got the Ponte Molle--the old Milvian bridge--a good deal too far down the stream, if I remember. I happened to notice that, but I did not read the article carefully. May I ask whether you propose to do me the honor of reporting this visit and the conversation we have had, for the columns of the newspaper with which you are connected?"

The Interviewer thought he saw an opening. "If you have no objections,"

he said, "I should like very much to ask a few questions." He was recovering his professional audacity.

"You can ask as many questions as you consider proper and discreet, --after you have answered one or two of mine: Who commissioned you to submit me to examination?"

"The curiosity of the public wishes to be gratified, and I am the humble agent of its investigations."

"What has the public to do with my private affairs?"

"I suppose it is a question of majority and minority. That settles everything in this country. You are a minority of one opposed to a large number of curious people that form a majority against you. That is the way I've heard the chief put it."

Maurice could not help smiling at the quiet a.s.sumption of the American citizen. The Interviewer smiled, too, and thought he had his man, sure, at last. Maurice calmly answered, "There is nothing left for minorities, then, but the right of rebellion. I don't care about being made the subject of an article for your paper. I am here for my pleasure, minding my own business, and content with that occupation. I rebel against your system of forced publicity. Whenever I am ready I shall tell the public all it has any right to know about me. In the mean time I shall request to be spared reading my biography while I am living. I wish you a good-morning."

The Interviewer had not taken out his note-book and pencil. In his next communication from Arrowhead Village he contented himself with a brief mention of the distinguished and accomplished gentleman now visiting the place, whose library and cabinet of coins he had had the privilege of examining, and whose courtesy was equalled only by the modesty that shunned the public notoriety which the organs of popular intelligence would otherwise confer upon him.

The Interviewer had attempted the riddle of the Sphinx, and had failed to get the first hint of its solution.

The many tongues of the village and its visitors could not remain idle.

The whole subject of antipathies had been talked over, and the various cases recorded had become more or less familiar to the conversational circles which met every evening in the different centres of social life. The prevalent hypothesis for the moment was that Maurice had a congenital aversion to some color, the effects of which upon him were so painful or disagreeable that he habitually avoided exposure to it.

It was known, and it has already been mentioned, that such cases were on record. There had been a great deal of discussion, of late, with reference to a fact long known to a few individuals, but only recently made a matter of careful scientific observation and brought to the notice of the public. This was the now well-known phenomenon of color-blindness. It did not seem very strange that if one person in every score or two could not tell red from green there might be other curious individual peculiarities relating to color. A case has already been referred to where the subject of observation fainted at the sight of any red object. What if this were the trouble with Maurice Kirkwood?

It will be seen at once how such a congenital antipathy would tend to isolate the person who was its unfortunate victim. It was an hypothesis not difficult to test, but it was a rather delicate business to be experimenting on an inoffensive stranger. Miss Vincent was thinking it over, but said nothing, even to Euthymia, of any projects she might entertain.

XII. MISS VINCENT AS A MEDICAL STUDENT.

The young lady whom we have known as The Terror, as Lurida, as Miss Vincent, Secretary of the Pansophian Society, had been reading various works selected for her by Dr. b.u.t.ts,--works chiefly relating to the nervous system and its different affections. She thought it was about time to talk over the general subject of the medical profession with her new teacher,--if such a self-directing person as Lurida could be said to recognize anybody as teacher.

She began at the beginning. "What is the first book you would put in a student's hands, doctor?" she said to him one day. They were in his study, and Lurida had just brought back a thick volume on Insanity, one of Bucknill and Puke's, which she had devoured as if it had been a pamphlet.

"Not that book, certainly," he said. "I am afraid it will put all sorts of notions into your head. Who or what set you to reading that, I should like to know?"

"I found it on one of your shelves, and as I thought I might perhaps be crazy some time or other, I felt as if I should like to know what kind of a condition insanity is. I don't believe they were ever very bright, those insane people, most of them. I hope I am not stupid enough ever to lose my wits."

"There is no telling, my dear, what may happen if you overwork that busy brain of yours. But did n't it make you nervous, reading about so many people possessed with such strange notions?"

"Nervous? Not a bit. I could n't help thinking, though, how many people I had known that had a little touch of craziness about them. Take that poor woman that says she is Her Majesty's Person,--not Her Majesty, but Her Majesty's Person,--a very important distinction, according to her: how she does remind me of more than one girl I have known! She would let her skirts down so as to make a kind of train, and pile things on her head like a sort of crown, fold her arms and throw her head back, and feel as grand as a queen. I have seen more than one girl act very much in that way. Are not most of us a little crazy, doctor,--just a little?

I think so. It seems to me I never saw but one girl who was free from every hint of craziness."

"And who was that, pray?"

"Why, Euthymia,--n.o.body else, of course. She never loses her head,--I don't believe she would in an earthquake. Whenever we were at work with our microscopes at the Inst.i.tute I always told her that her mind was the only achromatic one I ever looked into,--I did n't say looked through.---But I did n't come to talk about that. I read in one of your books that when Sydenham was asked by a student what books he should read, the great physician said, 'Read "Don Quixote."' I want you to explain that to me; and then I want you to tell me what is the first book, according to your idea, that a student ought to read."

"What do you say to my taking your question as the subject of a paper to be read before the Society? I think there may be other young ladies at the meeting, besides yourself, who are thinking of pursuing the study of medicine. At any rate, there are a good many who are interested in the subject; in fact, most people listen readily to anything doctors tell them about their calling."

"I wish you would, doctor. I want Euthymia to hear it, and I don't doubt there will be others who will be glad to hear everything you have to say about it. But oh, doctor, if you could only persuade Eutbymia to become a physician! What a doctor she would make! So strong, so calm, so full of wisdom! I believe she could take the wheel of a steamboat in a storm, or the hose of a fire-engine in a conflagration, and handle it as well as the captain of the boat or of the fire-company."

"Have you ever talked with her about studying medicine?"

"Indeed I have. Oh, if she would only begin with me! What good times we would have studying together!"

"I don't doubt it. Medicine is a very pleasant study. But how do you think practice would be? How would you like being called up to ride ten miles in a midnight snow-storm, just when one of your raging headaches was racking you?"

"Oh, but we could go into partnership, and Euthymia is n't afraid of storms or anything else. If she would only study medicine with me!"

"Well, what does she say to it?"

"She does n't like the thought of it. She does n't believe in women doctors. She thinks that now and then a woman may be fitted for it by nature, but she does n't think there are many who are. She gives me a good many reasons against their practising medicine, you know what most of them are, doctor,--and ends by saying that the same woman who would be a poor sort of doctor would make a first-rate nurse; and that, she thinks, is a woman's business, if her instinct carries her to the hospital or sick-chamber. I can't argue her ideas out of her."

"Neither can I argue you out of your feeling about the matter; but I am disposed to agree with your friend, that you will often spoil a good nurse to make a poor doctor. Doctors and side-saddles don't seem to me to go together. Riding habits would be awkward things for pract.i.tioners.

But come, we won't have a controversy just now. I am for giving women every chance for a good education, and if they think medicine is one of their proper callings let them try it. I think they will find that they had better at least limit themselves to certain specialties, and always have an expert of the other s.e.x to fall back upon. The trouble is that they are so impressible and imaginative that they are at the mercy of all sorts of fancy systems. You have only to see what kinds of instruction they very commonly flock to in order to guess whether they would be likely to prove sensible pract.i.tioners. Charlatanism always hobbles on two crutches, the tattle of women, and the certificates of clergymen, and I am afraid that half the women doctors will be too much under both those influences."

Lurida believed in Dr. b.u.t.ts, who, to use the common language of the village, had "carried her through" a fever, brought on by over-excitement and exhausting study. She took no offence at his reference to nursery gossip, which she had learned to hold cheap. n.o.body so despises the weaknesses of women as the champion of woman's rights.

She accepted the doctor's concession of a fair field and open trial of the fitness of her s.e.x for medical practice, and did not trouble herself about his suggested limitations. As to the imaginative tendencies of women, she knew too well the truth of the doctor's remark relating to them to wish to contradict it.

"Be sure you let me have your paper in season for the next meeting, doctor," she said; and in due season it came, and was of course approved for reading.

XIII. DR. b.u.t.tS READS A PAPER.

"Next to the interest we take in all that relates to our immortal souls is that which we feel for our mortal bodies. I am afraid my very first statement may be open to criticism. The care of the body is the first thought with a great many,--in fact, with the larger part of the world.

They send for the physician first, and not until he gives them up do they commonly call in the clergyman. Even the minister himself is not so very different from other people. We must not blame him if he is not always impatient to exchange a world of multiplied interests and ever-changing sources of excitement for that which tradition has delivered to us as one eminently deficient in the stimulus of variety.

Besides, these bodily frames, even when worn and disfigured by long years of service, hang about our consciousness like old garments. They are used to us, and we are used to them. And all the accidents of our lives,--the house we dwell in, the living people round us, the landscape we look over, all, up to the sky that covers us like a bell gla.s.s,--all these are but looser outside garments which we have worn until they seem a part of us, and we do not like the thought of changing them for a new suit which we have never yet tried on. How well I remember that dear ancient lady, who lived well into the last decade of her century, as she repeated the verse which, if I had but one to choose, I would select from that string of pearls, Gray's 'Elegy'!

"'For who to dumb forgetfulness a prey This pleasing, anxious being e'er resigned, Left the warm precincts of the cheerful day, Nor cast one longing, lingering look behind?'

"Plotinus was ashamed of his body, we are told. Better so, it may be, than to live solely for it, as so many do. But it may be well doubted if there is any disciple of Plotinus in this Society. On the contrary, there are many who think a great deal of their bodies, many who have come here to regain the health they have lost in the wear and tear of city life, and very few who have not at some time or other of their lives had occasion to call in the services of a physician.

"There is, therefore, no impropriety in my offering to the members some remarks upon the peculiar difficulties which beset the medical pract.i.tioner in the discharge of his laborious and important duties.

"A young friend of mine, who has taken an interest in medical studies, happened to meet with a very familiar story about one of the greatest and most celebrated of all English physicians, Thomas Sydenham. The story is that, when a student asked him what books he should read, the great doctor told him to read 'Don Quixote.'

"This piece of advice has been used to throw contempt upon the study of books, and furnishes a convenient shield for ignorant pretenders.

But Sydenham left many writings in which he has recorded his medical experience, and he surely would not have published them if he had not thought they would be better reading for the medical student than the story of Cervantes. His own works are esteemed to this day, and he certainly could not have supposed that they contained all the wisdom of all the past. No remedy is good, it was said of old, unless applied at the right time in the right way. So we may say of all anecdotes, like this which I have told you about Sydenham and the young man. It is very likely that he carried him to the bedside of some patients, and talked to him about the cases he showed him, instead of putting a Latin volume in his hand. I would as soon begin in that way as any other, with a student who had already mastered the preliminary branches,--who knew enough about the structure and functions of the body in health.

"But if you ask me what reading I would commend to the medical student of a philosophical habit of mind, you may be surprised to hear me say it would be certain pa.s.sages in 'Ra.s.selas.' They are the ones where the astronomer gives an account to Imlac of his management of the elements, the control of which, as he had persuaded himself, had been committed to him. Let me read you a few sentences from this story, which is commonly bound up with the 'Vicar of Wakefield,' like a woollen lining to a silken mantle, but is full of stately wisdom in processions of paragraphs which sound as if they ought to have a grammatical drum-major to march before their tramping platoons.

"The astronomer has taken Imlac into his confidence, and reveals to him the secret of his wonderful powers:--

"'Hear, Imlac, what thou wilt not without difficulty credit. I have possessed for five years the regulation of the weather and the distribution of the seasons the sun has listened to my dictates, and pa.s.sed from tropic to tropic by my direction; the clouds, at my call, have poured their waters, and the Nile has overflowed at my command; I have restrained the rage of the dog-star, and mitigated the fervors of the crab. The winds alone, of all the elemental powers, have hitherto eluded my authority, and mult.i.tudes have perished by equinoctial tempests, which I found myself unable to prohibit or restrain.'

"The reader naturally wishes to know how the astronomer, a sincere, devoted, and most benevolent man, for forty years a student of the heavens, came to the strange belief that he possessed these miraculous powers. This is his account:

"'One day, as I was looking on the fields withering with heat, I felt in my mind a sudden wish that I could send rain on the southern mountains, and raise the Nile to an inundation. In the hurry of my imagination I commanded rain to fall, and by comparing the time of my command with that of the inundation I found that the clouds had listened to my lips.'